2/05/2009 @ 12:01AM

Letting Google Take Your Pulse

Google
is the Web’s king of data collection, aggregating details from users’ search queries, e-mail, even phones and photos. Now, thanks to a partnership with
IBM
, it’s about to start pulling that personal information directly from users’ bodies.

On Thursday, Google
and IBM
will unveil a new initiative that will allow Google Health, a site where users can store and track information about their medical history, to connect to and stream data from medical devices. In demonstrations, IBM and Google fitted Wi-Fi radios to gadgets like heart rate monitors, blood pressure cuffs, scales and blood-sugar measurement meters, allowing the devices to communicate with a PC and feed real-time medical information directly into Google’s online records.

Hooking up those devices to the Web, IBM argues, will offer a new immediacy and granularity of health monitoring. A user can remotely track the blood pressure readings or glucose levels of a diabetic parent living alone, or stream his or her medical information like weight or heart rate directly to a doctor or physical trainer.

“If there’s something abnormal, you can catch it before you have an episodic intervention, like going to the emergency room,” says Dan Pelino, manager of IBM’s health care division. “This is like OnStar for a patient, keeping constant information about you and sending alerts even before you have a problem.”

For IBM, the new Google Health functions are also a dress rehearsal for “smart” health care nationwide. The computing giant has been coaxing the health care industry for years to create a digitized and centrally stored database of patients’ records. That idea may finally be coming to fruition, as President Obama’s infrastructure stimulus package works its way through Congress, with $20 billion of the $819 billion fiscal injection aimed at building a new digitized health record system.

In its partnership with Google, as in previous “smart” health care projects with the Mayo Clinic and the national health care systems of Denmark and Canada, IBM wants to prove it has the software and hardware necessary to organize and store millions of private records securely. In Google’s case, IBM’s software platform, Websphere, will aggregate and translate data from medical devices. Business intelligence apps from IBM’s
Cognos
acquisition will serve up that information in a form that can be displayed by Google’s user interface. IBM is also putting its weight behind common standards that will allow medical devices and digitized health records to interact smoothly between products from different vendors.

“We’re doing it in Denmark and Canada, why can’t this be done in the U.S. on a larger scale?” asks Pelino. “This kind of secure exchange of data has happened in other industries, and we’re at the dawning of that era in health care.”

But for both IBM and Google, the health program’s new connectivity could also raise fresh privacy complaints. Activists have called Google Health a threat to users’ personal information since word of the service began to emerge in late 2007. What the companies offer as a convenient repository for medical data, some critics say, may also be a source of highly private information that Google can use for ad targeting.

“They give consumers the appearance of an effective way to keep their health information, but it’s also a digital gold mine for health marketing,” says Jeff Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy, who points to Google’s sponsorship of the ePharma drug marketing conference taking place in Philadelphia next week. “It’s one thing to turn your search queries over to Google. This is like making them your next of kin,” Chester says. “Why would you give an advertising company access to your moment-by-moment expression of health concerns and risks?”

Google’s terms of service for Google Health warns users that inputting data on the site gives the company “a license to use and distribute [data] in connection with Google Health and other Google services.” It adds that Google’s transmission of health information to a third party isn’t covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a piece of legislation that includes data privacy regulations.

Google insists that it doesn’t use or plan to use Google Health information for advertising purposes. “We take privacy and security incredibly seriously, because we believe in it and because our business depends on it,” says Roni Zeiger, Google’s product manager for Google Health. “The patient has complete control. They decide what they put in. If they import other data, they–and only they–decide whether they will share the data with anyone. Adding devices doesn’t change the story at all.”

IBM, for its part, takes the privacy issue as a chance to show that digital health care can work on a wider scale. “People used to be concerned about using the Internet for commerce, and now we have secure ways of making credit card transactions online,” IBM’s Pelino says. “Those same security levels need to be brought to health care. That’s what we’ve done before, and that’s what we’re doing with Google.”